Why Japanese is Hard to Learn, or The Secrets of Japanese

This infographic comes from Voxy Blog.

Click to enlarge.

Although most people say that it is extremely difficult for English speakers to learn Japanese (understand and/or translate it effectively) because of its grammatical differences, I have come to the conclusion that it is because the proper grammatical perspective/foundation needed to understand Japanese is simply hidden from students. It is not because of the inherent difficulty of the language. Whether that secret information has been hidden on purpose or by accident I can't quite tell: Linguistics supplies the tools to understand language from syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives, so the knowledge needed to form a better curriculum for teaching Japanese is out there somewhere, though possibly in bits and pieces that have yet to be fashioned into a cohesive approach. Unfortunately, decades of well-intentioned ineffectiveness stand between each student of Japanese and the knowledge that would demystify the language. To paint a clearer picture of the situation, I'll back up and present a few objective obstacles to learning Japanese.


It is not just prestige-seeking braggarts and students making excuses for poor grades that say Japanese is difficult: Even the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) recognize its difficulty. This declassified paper from the NSA concludes that for English speakers Japanese is relatively harder than Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Arabic, and Vietnamese among others. The FSI has developed a rough categorization of languages (see infographic on the right) according to the approximate study time needed in order for its students to reach its goals. The people at the FSI expect to have to train their students with 2200 hours of class split up into 88 weeks. That's daunting in comparison to Spanish, which is only 600 hours max spread over a maximum of 24 weeks. Let's not forget that those figures do not include the students' study time—it's only the class time! Moreover, the FSI's program is designed with people who are already highly motivated and able to learn language relatively well in a class setting. Since the NSA paper does a thorough job detailing what kinds of factors make learning a foreign language difficult (with especially detailed explanations about Japanese), I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and explain all the features of Japanese that back up these huge numbers; inquiring minds should just check the paper. Instead, I'm going to get straight to my perspective about the problems with Japanese education, why I consider the information hidden, and why I think we can do better than what we have.

When two communities that each speak a different language come into contact, a lot of things can happen—even if you rule out the possibility that one will conquer the other. Sometimes a primitive, mostly grammarless language with words borrowed from the two full-fledged languages develops (In linguistics it's called a pidgin). The Pidgin language can help people get by with daily tasks, such as simple sales and transactions. If children are raised in the pidgin language environment, they might assign more grammar onto the pidgin, expand its vocabulary, and cause it to become a new, separate language (called a Creole). Or perhaps the children grow up to be bilingual. In any case, it's gonna be a while before complicated communication in one language can be understood/interpreted/translated for the other. In the meantime people have to try to decode words and grammar by the situation, make hypotheses about the meanings of the words and the structure of the grammar, and see whether the hypotheses continue to make sense for new situations. Consider how many nuances there are in the word order of English and in vocabulary words such as accountability and responsibility, killing and murder, honest, frank, and blunt. Clearly it's a monumental task. If the two languages are similar (English and Spanish for instance), it's a much easier story—but if the two languages are entirely different in word order and vocabulary (English and Japanese), then it's more complicated. That doesn't even take into account cultural differences in communication. Once some of the members of each community believe they have decoded enough of the other language, they probably start teaching it. Since neither side has a complete picture, there are going to be things that are unclear or even entirely wrong.

One way to teach language in this kind of environment is to teach set translations of difficult expressions and to show students how to use certain grammatical structures in certain situations. Usually this means learning sentence "patterns" that have blanks left in them so that the learner can substitute different nouns or verbs. Then it doesn't matter if no one knows how to use the grammar in any situation: everyone can squeak by for topics they're taught. In this kind of instruction, there's very little emphasis on understanding grammar, whether in the native language or in the other language. Japanese is usually taught this way. For example, many Japanese textbooks do not mention parts of speech and do not label new vocabulary words with possible parts of speech. That can be very confusing if one does not know much about the grammar of the language. If you don't tell English learners that jump can be a verb and a noun, or that some words (such as exploit) have different pronunciations depending on the part of speech, they might not learn how to use or understand those words, even if they have a general idea of what they mean.

Now, this is not to say that that approach to teaching language is all wrong: It can help student's develop fluency by making them familiar with certain ways of saying things and making them repeat similar sentences. Instead of thinking through the grammar to build a sentence for the situation, students can default to certain patterns they know and switch out a few words to adjust to the specific topic and get their point across. However, because they do not know much about the grammar, students will be more likely to make mistakes or be unable to understand "new" uses of the words or structures they learned. They will also have more trouble adjusting to new topics or trying to find ways to express nuances in their native language. A simplistic example of this problem in Japanese education for English speakers is how to say "thank you".

No matter how much you would enjoy this card,

"thank you" cannot change tense.

In Japanese there are many variations, but the main word for it is arigatou. Although in English one can only say "thank you" without verb tense/in the present tense, in Japanese you can say it in the present (arigatou gozaimasu) or the past (arigatou gozaimashita). Without knowing about the grammar involved, English speakers get confused about the difference and do not learn to use it correctly. There are several relatively simple yet surprising grammatical points involved. The first is that arigatou is an adverb formed from the adjective arigatai, which means thankful. The second is that gozaimasu is the super-polite way to say the verb arimasu, which is one of the words for be. The last one is that in Japanese, the basic pattern of describing things is [adverb] + [existence/being verb], not [form of be]+[adjective]. In the end, the two expressions for "thank you" mean "I am thankful" and "I was thankful". Unfortunately, none of those three basic grammatical rules/observations are taught in Japanese class, and the difference between the two expressions is not explained well. This is what I mean by saying that the key to learning Japanese is hidden from students and that the information is secret. It would be extremely easy to explain grammatical points like these in class, and it would probably save many students a few headaches, but for whatever reason, the information just isn't widely available.

Although I can't say for sure, I suspect that Japanese classes typically do not include this information because the material for teaching Japanese-speakers English and the material for teaching English-speakers Japanese are probably old and probably contain the kinds of mistakes that naturally result during the long process of decoding other languages that happens when languages come into contact. Previous generations' hard work at deciphering words, creating dictionaries, and understanding unfamiliar expressions and grammatical structures was not perfect (nor should it have been), and the mistaken/incomplete explanations and solutions have piled up and been transferred through classes to future generations. After all, most Japanese teachers are native speakers of Japanese with an imperfect understanding of English acquired from English-speakers with little to no understanding of Japanese. Similarly, many English teachers in Japan are native speakers of English with an imperfect understanding of Japanese. There are also many English teachers who are native Japanese-speakers with an imperfect knowledge of English acquired from other Japanese-speakers with an imperfect knowledge of English. However, English and Japanese have been in contact for at least 160 years. We should be able to make better grammatical and semantic descriptions now, and we should be able to use the new analysis to revise and demystify the troublesome areas of these languages. Just as this post explained why "thank you" has tense in Japanese, future posts in the series "The Secrets of Japanese" will each tackle a specific difficulty I've run into and discuss the grammatical secret(s) that make each problem easier to understand.